What goes on inside the minds of animals?
What do they think of?
And, how do they view us humans?
Well, one new study shows what happens inside the mind of seagulls, and how they view humans, and, it turns out, seagulls are intelligent animals, that base decisions through their observations of humans.
A new study published in Biology Letters, reports it's findings about how seagulls make decisions about what food they are going to eat. The scientists created a study which focused on observing herring gulls, and how the herring gulls choose their food, they found that gulls were intelligent animals.
The gulls intelligence was seen in how the gulls observed human behaviour, and copied that behaviour. Urban gulls were found to observe the food that humans ate, and, they also chose to eat what they had observed humans eating.
The scientists found that 95% of the gulls that were observed, copied humans in what they ate. In other words, when two crisp packets were made available for the gulls to eat, 95% of the gulls chose to eat the packet of crisps that they just observed humans eating, this shows that herring gulls are aware that there's two different choices of crisps on offer, know that there's a difference between the crisps, and, observe what humans eat and then choose to eat what we are eating.
What this shows is that gulls, and probably other animals, are aware and pay attention to what humans do, and, have a high level of consciousness and intelligence. It also shows that animals can and do learn from humans, human behaviour, and human consciousness.
The study shows an interesting insight into the minds of seagulls and potentially other animals too.
The study also shows that intelligence, conciousness, observations and making decisions is not unique to humans, but is shared with animals too. nciousness
It shows us that we still have much to learn from animals and the natural world. Perhaps it also could be argued that it shows us that seagulls are better and intelligent observers of us, than we are of them.
You can read the full study on Biology Letters.
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